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Racine and Barthes: the Power of Love

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Racine and Barthes: the Power of Love Racine and Barthes: The Power of Love Delphine Calle hat does a seventeenth-century playwright share with a modern W literary critic? Not much, one would think. Yet Jean Racine and Roland Barthes owe a debt to each other. When in 1963 Barthes writes Sur Racine, the essay contributes to the notoriety of its author, who, in return, dusts off the work and image of Racine. Central for both writers’ success is their account of the love theme in tragedy. The passions assure Racine’s triumph during his life and his poetic legacy in the centuries to come, until Barthes daringly shakes their foundations. In this essay, I want to show the importance of the love theme both for the plays of Racine and for Barthes’ essay on them, for it divides critics and public, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. To Love or Not to Love The seventeenth century bore witness to a growing interest in passion and love.1 Philosophers (Malebranche, Descartes)2, theologians (François de Sales, Fénelon)3, and moralists (Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère)4 engaged in fierce debates on the theme of love and passions. The numerous publications of love stories, in chronicles and novels, reflect the new taste and demands of the educated part of society: the idyllic novel of the pastoral, the gallant discussions on questions d’amour, the libertine genre and Madame de Lafayette’s masterpiece, La Princesse de Clèves, all represent heroes exploring the delights and the torments of (erotic) passion.5 The genre of tragedy is a bit more reluctant to embrace this love theme.6 Until the mid-century Pierre Corneille decides on the tragic genre. Recognising that love always brings ‘beaucoup d’agrément’, he nevertheless subordinates it to ‘quelque passion plus noble et plus mâle que l’amour, telles que sont l’ambition ou la vengeance’ (a more noble and virile passion than love, such as ambition and vengeance).7 Love is never a purpose in itself. The traditional Cornelian heroic tragedy is, however, Barthes Studies, 4 (2018), 56-70. ISSN: 2058-3680 Delphine Calle challenged by a more modern, explicitly gallant tragedy. Dramatists such as Philippe Quinault and Thomas Corneille show a gentler kind of invincible love that was more likely to move the audience.8 Theatre critics admit – often to their regret – that love brings closer the actors and the audience: ‘Rejeter l’amour de nos Tragédies comme indigne des Héros, c’est ôter ce qui leur reste de plus humain, ce qui nous fait tenir encore à eux un secret rapport’ (To reject love in our Tragedies as unworthy of Heroes is to deprive them of their most human character, of what installs a secret bond between those heroes and ourselves). 9 Advocating for a virtuous theatre without love, the abbé Pierre de Villiers sighs: ‘Je sais bien qu’il est difficile d[’]entreprendre [la Tragédie sans Amour], et encore plus d’y réussir dans un siècle où l’on veut de l’amour et de la galanterie partout’ (I know very well that it is difficult to undertake a Tragedy without Love, and even more to succeed in it, in a time where one wants love and gallantry everywhere).10 Indeed, while Racine’s first tragedy, the cruel La Thébaïde, did not please the public; the gallant Alexandre le Grand was more successful. Eventually the third play, Andromaque (1667), marks the birth of the actual Racinian tragedy. Its première has a tremendous impact on the audience. The résumé – Oreste loves Hermione who loves Pyrrhus who loves Andromaque who loves Hector who is dead – is revealing: love lies at the core of the play. In this way, Racine may tend to the gallant vogue in tragedy, but he combines this prominent love with the classical and heroic tragic ingredients. Racine’s loyalty to ancient and historical sources, for instance, contrasts with the bulk of the invention in the work of his gallant colleagues. In short, to rephrase Jean-Christophe Cavallin: from Andromaque onwards, Racine seeks to ‘attendrir et […] convertir à l’amour l’ancienne tragédie héroïque’ (to endear and […] to convert to love the old heroic tragedy).11 This Racinian love surpasses by far pure gallantry, given its extent, its violent and often jealous nature and the fact that it spares not even the greatest heroes. Precisely this ‘abnormal, almost monstrous character’ of the love relationships in Racine pleases Barthes. 12 Even later on, when Barthes radically changes his opinion on Racine, he thinks that the passions are still appealing: ‘Autant j’aime Michelet, autant je n’aime pas Racine; je n’ai pu m’y intéresser qu’en me forçant à y injecter des problèmes personnels d’aliénation amoureuse’ (As much as I love Michelet, I don’t love Racine; I could only take interest in his work by forcing myself to inject it with my personal problems of amorous alienation).13 57 Delphine Calle Despite Barthes’ penchant for the Racinian passions, Sur Racine emphasizes that love is not the essence of Racine’s plays: ‘Le rapport essentiel est un rapport d’autorité, l’amour ne sert qu’à le révéler. […] le théâtre de Racine n’est pas un théâtre d’amour’ (‘The essential relation is one of authority, love serves only to reveal it. […] Racine’s theatre is not a theatre of love’).14 Hence, Barthes continues, ‘il n’y a chez lui d’autre constellation érotique que celle du pouvoir et de la sujétion’ (‘there is no other erotic constellation in his theatre but that of power and subjection’). 15 Barthes represents this general power relation as an equation: ‘A a tout pouvoir sur B. A aime B, qui ne l’aime pas’ (‘A has complete power over B. A loves B, who does not love A’).16 This fragment is the foundation and main idea of Sur Racine, for Barthes reveals a core set of power relations, followed by their implications, in each and every play. In Bajazet, for instance, the equation accurately defines the relationship between Roxane and Bajazet. Roxane (A), the sultan’s favourite and ruler in his absence, has to determine the fate of her prisoner, Bajazet (B). She is madly in love with him, but Bajazet loves another woman, Atalide. Barthes summarizes the stake of the entire tragic universe by one ‘parole profonde’: the unhealthy power relations generally stem from the mythical father-child conflict, from the customs of a primitive horde, governed by power and lust.17 When it comes to love, Barthes therefore defines the true Racinian love as a violent, disruptive Eros-Event, in opposition to a sweet ‘sororal’ Eros. In Bajazet, for instance, Roxane would be possessed by Eros-Event, while the reciprocal love of Bajazet and Atalide would be sororal. Tragedy is the desired but impossible passage from Eros-Event to the more enduring sororal Eros: Ces deux Éros sont incompatibles, on ne peut passer de l’un à l’autre, de l’amour-ravissement (qui est toujours condamné) à l’amour-durée (qui est toujours espéré), c’est là l’une des formes fondamentales de l’échec racinien. This double Eros is incompatible, one cannot proceed from one to the other, from love-as-rape (which is always condemned) to love-as-duration (which is always coveted), and this impossibility constitutes one of the fundamental forms of Racinian failure.18 Subsequently Barthes does acknowledge the ‘fundamental’ role of love in Racine: it actually triggers the tragic proper in the play. Despite this 58 Delphine Calle apparent contradiction, readers of Sur Racine particularly admired Barthes’ attempt to question the importance of love in Racine’s theatre. According to Louis Althusser, this insight made Barthes’ book: ‘Enfin quelqu’un pour dire que la fameuse “psychologie” racinienne, que les fameuses, et si violentes, et si pures et si farouches, passions raciniennes, ça n’existe pas!’ (Finally someone who says that the famous Racinian ‘psychology’, that the famous and so violent, and so pure and feral Racinian passions don’t exist!). 19 Yet, rather than the lack of passions, Althusser’s exclamation applauds the controversy and the resistance to the traditional studies of Racine. In short, while Racine owed his fame to the elaboration of the love theme in his tragedies, Barthes makes a name for himself by denying the importance of love. In this way both break with tradition. ‘Plus d’amour’: More Love or No More Love? In contrast to their prototypically classical image today, Racine’s plays were perceived as far from conventional by their contemporary audience. Pious seventeenth-century France was divided in two ways of considering theatre.20 The first, following Augustine, condemned all kinds of theatre because of its pernicious effects on the morals; the second, Thomist perception supported the possibility of a Christian and edifying theatre. Both condemned the representation of violent amorous passions on stage, in opposition to the audience who requested an elaborate love theme. Consequently Racine was caught between two fires and often had to cope with fierce criticism. Two important ‘querelles’ illustrate his relation with these two categories of critics. The first conflict, the ‘querelle des Imaginaires’, opposes the young Racine to the adherents of the severe Augustinian rejection of theatre. The querelle is sparked by the moralist Pierre Nicole, a prominent member of the ‘Jansenist’ community at Port Royal, who censures all work of fiction: Un faiseur de romans et un poète de théâtre est un empoisonneur public, non des corps, mais des âmes des fidèles, qui se doit regarder comme coupable d’une infinité d’homicides spirituels, ou qu’il a causés en effet ou qu’il a pu causer par ses écrits pernicieux.
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